Knowledge Alchemy
This book introduces the concept of ‘knowledge alchemy’ to capture the generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards. Using examples from around the world, this book explores how knowledge alchemy increasingly informs national and institutional policies and practices on economic performance, higher education, research, and innovation. Governments have embraced global models of world-class university, human capital, and talent competition as essential in ensuring national competitiveness. This strongly future-oriented and anticipatory knowledge governance is steered by a surge of global classifications, rankings, and indicators, resulting in numerical comparisons of various domains that today form more constraining global policy scripts (download the Introduction).
Administrative Theory & Praxis
Special issues: 44(4) and 45(2) - ‘Beyond Administrative Sovereignty: Rethinking Directionalities and Objects in Administration and Policy’
‘Methodological Americanism: Disciplinary senility and intellectual hegemonies in (American) public administration’: In this article, we introduce the concept of methodological Americanism to describe and explain the epistemological problem plaguing the public administration discipline. We argue that the discipline, dominated by US-focused analyses, is methodologically nationalist and White and represents a hegemonic intellectualism that limits what is “knowable.” To ensure continual disciplinary relevance of public administration studies, we propose that epistemological diversity—achievable by reshaping the disciplinary table—is the way forward. We conclude by summarizing how the articles in this first of two Special Issues contribute to paving the way toward epistemological diversity (download).
‘Methodological Nationalism and Epistemological Diversity in (American) Public Administration’: This paper outlines an agenda for overcoming methodological nationalism in contemporary public administration studies. Our agenda reflects an acknowledgement of diverse lived administrative experiences around the world. Such experiences are the results of local administrative conditions and their interaction with transnational pressures and cross-border activities that transform the administrative landscape over time. However, the hegemonic intellectualism prevalent in American public administration studies has legitimized only a few experiences worthy of attention. Our proposed agenda starts with this baseline observation and advocates taking two bold steps to challenge this hegemonic intellectualism. First, it is essential to recognize the empirical and theoretical vacuum in public administration studies concerning how “beyond the state” activities configure and reconfigure national and local administration and policy. Second, taking a step towards intellectual pluralism, it is fruitful to recognize that connecting with those pushing research on transnational administration and global policy could benefit the discipline. We conclude by describing how the articles in this special issue connect with this agenda (download).
Designing for Policy Effectiveness
The field of policy studies has always been interested in analyzing and improving the sets of policy tools adopted by governments to correct policy problems, and better understanding and improving processes of policy analysis and policy formulation in order to do so. Past studies have helped clarify the role of historical processes, policy capacities and design intentions in affecting policy formulation processes, and more recently in understanding how the bundling of multiple policy elements together to meet policy goals can be better understood and done. While this work has progressed, however, the discussion of what goals policy designs should serve remains disjointed. Here it is argued that a central goal, in fact, 'the' central goal, of policy design is effectiveness. Effectiveness serves as the basic goal of any design, upon which is built other goals such as efficiency or equity.
Policy and Society
Special issue: 36(1) - ‘Higher Education Governance and Policy: Multi-issue, Multi-level, and Multi-Actor Dynamics’
This thematic issue introduces the multifaceted nature of contemporary public policy – its multi-level, multi-actor and multi-issue features – using the case of higher education policies from around the world. To do so, this introduction first describes how higher education as a policy sector should be garnering far more attention from scholars interested in political, economic and social transformation. A framework for identifying and accounting for how the ‘multi-s’ characteristics configure and re-configure public policy is then introduced. Next, this thematic issue’s contributions are summarized with highlights of how they bring to life the different ‘multi-s’ features. This introduction concludes with a discussion of what the proposed framework of the ‘multi-s’ offers to studies of higher education policy coordination. In so doing, the objectives of this thematic issue are to highlight what the case of higher education policy coordination offers to studies of public policy and to initiate a dialogue between all social scientists and practitioners interested in the increased complexity of governing, producing and using knowledge today (download).
European Journal of Higher Education
Special issue: 6(3) - ‘The terrains of the Europe of Knowledge’
This editorial introduces how we may begin to analytically study the shifting terrains of the Europe of Knowledge. Knowledge policies – higher education, research, and innovation – are integral to many sectors, and changes in the ways in which knowledge is governed will inevitably alter the shape and contents of other policy domains. The contributions of this special issue reveal some of these shifting patterns by analysing the relationship between central features of multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-issue policy-making in the knowledge domain: the ideas that inspire reform, the institutions tasked to implement the changes, the instruments adopted for translating ideas into practice, and the diverse interests of actors with a stake in how knowledge is governed. By invoking the image of terrains, this special issue is interested in describing and explaining what happens to the Europe of Knowledge landscapes when the ‘old’ meets and interacts with the ‘new’.
The Transnational Politics of Higher Education
This edited volume introduces readers to the relationship between higher education and transnational politics. It shows how higher education is a significant arena for regional and international transformation as well as domestic political struggle replete with unequal power relations. Drawing on case studies from across the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, the contributors develop diverse perspectives explaining the impact of transnational politics on higher education—and higher education on transitional politics—across time and locality. This book is among the first multi-disciplinary effort to wrestle with the question of how we can understand the political role of higher education, and the political force universities exert in the realm of international relations.
Journal of Contemporary European Research
Special issue: 11(1) - ‘New Horizons in the Europe of Knowledge’
This editorial introduces the notion of the Europe of Knowledge and places it in the European integration research agenda. We first describe what the concept means before suggesting how to approach the Europe of Knowledge as a new case for investigating European integration dynamics. This discussion revolves around the evolution of policy developments in research and higher education to show how knowledge policies are compound and manifest distinct dimensions of differentiated integration and experimentation, both fruitful theoretical research agendas. We then summarise the articles to show the respective Europe of Knowledge themes they highlight. We conclude by considering how the Europe of Knowledge in the making encourages testing established empirical and analytical assumptions about European integration and experimenting with emerging ideas about regional cooperation from around the world (download).
Building the Knowledge Economy in Europe
This edited volume investigates the dynamics of emerging knowledge policy domains on the European political agenda, and the dynamics of this in relation to knowledge policies. This book is the first comparative volume on European research and higher education policies. The chapters cover topics such as the idea of the European Research Area, sustainability of the Bologna Process, institution building for a Europe of Knowledge, domestic impact of EU level initiatives, and the role of the crisis in the European Higher Education Area. It accounts for the creation of key institutions administering EU funding and addresses the core issues of European integration in the knowledge domains.